Looking Back With Love

A Loose history of time: celebrating 50 years of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company

photo: Tony Dougherty

The audience rose to its feet at the end of each of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's Lincoln Center Festival performances at New York State Theater. We cheered for the marvelous works and the brilliant dancers. We cheered because Cunningham at 83 is celebrating what the season title hails as the company's "50 Years of Forward Motion" and because he shows every sign of plowing ahead, creaky joints be damned. (This is a man who, needing a wheelchair for airport corridors, is attempting to relearn the time step in a sitting position.)

Whether we know it or not, we're also applauding because Cunningham and his late musical director and partner, composer John Cage, altered our eyes and ears, teaching us to understand silence as a companion to sound and stillness as motion's lover. Before anyone talked of "negative space," Cunningham made us see it, and he exposed people unlikely to read Einstein to the vision of space as an open field devoid of fixed points.

In the years since Cunningham founded a small company at Black Mountain College during the summer of 1953, his dances, and even more so, Cage's music, have provoked some spectatorsdepriving them of narrative, conventional hierarchical and harmonic structures, and a hand-in-hand relationship between music, choreography, and decor. That the two men were not more maligned has to do, I think, with the elegance of their workeven in those compositions of Cage and his colleagues that assault our ears. In Cunningham's choreography, this elegance has nothing to do with display or ornamentation, but with fastidious craftsmanship and his dancers' erect bearing; their probing limbs; their air of serene intelligence; the way they give everything to the moment at hand with no excess.

Aperture has just published a book by Cunningham, Other Animals: Drawings and Journals. Every morning this man, who now uses the Lifeforms computer program as an aid in generating movement, sits and draws beguiling impressions of birds and animals (they have wise and witty eyes). I see no irony. He has written admiringly of animals' directness and efficiency in motion, and you see this in his dances. Especially in the earliest work on the Lincoln Center programs, the stunningly beautiful Suite for Five (1956-58), there is something creaturely in the dancers' quiet intensity, in the economy of their moves. This is a piece full of watching and waiting, in which, as a friend said, there is no cholesterol. The sounds of Cage's music for prepared piano (played by composer Christian Wolff) drop sparingly into quiet and sparsely populated space. When Cédric Andrieux, squatting, slowly extends one leg in front of him, bends it, extends it again, bends it, there is, for a moment, nothing in the world but that gesture. When Derry Swan shivers one leg as she slowly raises it to the side, its trajectory is imprinted on your brain. Daniel Roberts, Jeannie Steele, and Cheryl Therrien dance together as if they're having a conversation with no chitchat but many unexpected and surprising remarks. Swan and Andrieux perform, magnificently, the duet Cunningham made for himself and Carolyn Brown (who together restaged it for this celebration), and even if you understand how chance procedures figured in its making, you perceive it as rich with implicit feeling. Love and chance are partners anyway, no?

When Cunningham made Pictures in 1984 and Fabrications in 1987, his company was much larger, although the 15 people in each are rarely all onstage. Picturesabetted by David Behrman's music, with its delicate use of violin, and Mark Lancaster's lightingrepeatedly isolates small groups, maybe two at a time, in complex, but visually clear linked poses, as if they were being recorded for some inner photo album. In Fabrications, the women's retro dresses by Dove Bradshaw and the voices emerging from Emanuel Dimas De Melo Pimenta's score as if from an old radio enhance the image of community, of people watching out for one another, and the curious tenderness that emanates from the choreography (excellently restaged by Patricia Lent).

It's interesting to compare How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run (1965) with Cunningham's latest, Loose Time (2002). The nine dancers in the earlier work swing in and out of vigorous, ingenious activities that have the feel of lighthearted games without imitating them. And instead of sportscasters, we have Cunningham and David Vaughan reading John Cage's witty deadpan anecdotes. Wearing gray velvet jumpsuits, the 16 dancers in the new piece are cyber-athletes, their bodies programmed to manage several different rhythms and coordinations simultaneously, their stamina heroic. Terry Winters's trompe l'oeil set suggests layers of tennis netting intricately bent on a red background, and Julie Josephson's trombone pierces the texture of Christian Wolff's Moving Spaces for violin, piano, and electronic sound. This is one of Cunningham's rigorous pieces, like Torse from 1976. The dancers' bodies and necks bend more than they do in Fabrications, yet the impression is one of impulses controlled with superb precision. In brief solos for Jonah Bokaer and Daniel Squire, and a longer one for Holley Farmer, you imagine the movement being segmented and put together simultaneously before your eyes. Farmer is thoroughly amazing.

But, then, all of them are splendid. (I have to single out Robert Swinston, who in spite of his responsibilities re-staging and rehearsing dances, is performing more wonderfully than ever.) Mélange, a 2001 videodance by Cunningham and Charles Atlas, shows, via little works in different settings, some who are no longer in the company, and a two-part "anniversary video montage" offers glimpses of those who embodied and projected Cunningham's ideas over half a century. At one point, their names scroll down the screen year by year. For once, I wanted one of those gala shebangs in which all the dancers who've ever worked for Merce would walk onto the stage with the ghosts of those no longer living so that we could salute them for all that they gave him. And us.

The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane company is celebrating a couple of anniversaries this year: the group's 20th year and Jones's 50th birthday. At Jacob's Pillowwhich is honoring its own 70th with a revised edition of Norton Owen's excellent little book A Certain Place: The Jacob's Pillow StoryJones presented the two terrific new dances he showed at Alice Tully Hall last winter, Verbum and Black Suzanne, with the music ensemble Concertante making the barn theater resonate gloriously with the Beethoven Quartet for Strings in F Major, op. 135, which accompanies Verbum, and Shosktakovich's Prelude and Scherzo for String Octet, op. 11, for Black Suzanne. Germaul Yusef Barnes gave a powerful performance, in Power/Full, to a demented rant (score by John Oswald), in which "Jesus Christ" and "Power!" were melded in ways that would astonish the emissary of peace and love, before being joined by five others in a gentler ritual to Laurie McDonald's Kyrie.

The notable premiere wasn't new at all, but a reconstruction of Blauvelt Mountain (A Fiction), a section of the remarkable evening-long duet created and performed in 1979 by Jones and his partner, Arnie Zane, who died in 1988. Anyone who remembers the dance will see it as a palimpsest; shadowy memories of Bill and Arnie lurk behind the fine performances of Malcom Low and Wen-Chunginhabiting a cryptic gesture of pointing repeatedly to one palm (Jones) or a dogged circular run (Zane).

Blauvelt shows the influence of the 1960s avant-garde on two then-young choreographers. The dance is a series of tasksathletic, tender, confrontationalritualized through repetition. The men begin kneeling, backs to us. Amid the soft hum and singing voices in Helen Thorington's live-mixed score, Low slowly puts his arm around Lin, and together they twist, crumple, and thrust their legs in the air. Lin cradles Low's head and brings them to their feet.

The movements, however arduous, have an everyday bluntness about them, and the rhythms are forthright in an OK-we-did-this-now-let's-do-that way. I feel as if I'm living out a day with the men, or a symbol of all their days: their thoughtful moments, their mysteries. Sometimes they talk quietly to each other as they walk along, or converse in free associations we can barely hear. Many times, they strike individual poses in a circle of light, varying the relation to each other. Once they escalate a sequence of positions on stools to such a speed that one of them has to yell, "Stop!" Even a burst of angerthe hand offered and ignored, the chokehold, the pistol handbecomes a motif.

The considerable physical virtuosity doesn't depend on obvious "dance steps," and I was thrilled that people at the Pillow cheered for Low and Lin, for Jones and Zane. The applause was a little different from the applause for the other pieces and such fearless performers as, omigod, Ayo Janeen Jackson and Toshiko Oiwa. It would be interesting to see Jones's other casts for the pungent work: two women and a man-woman pair. In excavating Jones and Zane, Blauvelt Mountain dancers reveal themselves.